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Every little thing he clings to, every moment he’s stolen of her, are accidents.
He’d come to her village on the quest that had claimed two years of his life. He’d been spinning like a cog that had lost its place in the engine, driving nothing, turning out of desperation for something to do.
Her eyes had been colder than the ocean, and she’d stopped looking so young.
What if he’d given in to pity, instead of hardening his face as a Prince of the Fire Nation must?
But he’d swallowed his doubts in the face of looking tough in front of his men.
He tries not to think about what would have happened if he’d listened to his instincts then.
*
“I’ll save you from the pirates,” he said, because it was true, but what she didn’t know was that, by happenstance, he already had. He hadn’t done to her the things he’d seen soldiers do to enemy women (the things Uncle had advised him to punish with death; and when gentle, fun-loving Iroh’s eyes had turned to flint like that, Zuko had sat the fuck up and listened).
The pirates were there, and they were a threat to her. She was hopelessly naive if she thought anything else: she had nothing of value to tempt them to protect her. And, yes, he’d called her a peasant.
He’d been so angry, and had wanted the Avatar, and he’d made the mistake of thinking she’d bend to his will the way people below him should do.
But she got the better of him, and like the tide going out when he’d been preoccupied she’d managed to slip away.
He remembered, afterwards, how she’d faced him. Square on, abrupt, not like a bender at all: nothing of the guarded, balanced stance, the acceptance that an attack will come. She hadn’t angled herself away, to give her root more power.
She’d faced him like a battleship bearing down on a village. (Like his battleship bearing down on her village.)
She’d stared him in the eyes, and she’d been angry.
Afterwards, he’d wanted to apologise.
He’d wondered what made her so strong.
This time, he doesn’t ask what if.
*
He’d wanted to be strong, too, to sweep back into the Fire Nation and demand his father restore him to the line of succession.
He wanted to face down his father like that.
He wanted to face down Azula like that.
But it all got twisted up in his throat, and in his head. He shouldn’t be admiring a girl, and enemy peasant, no matter the colour of her eyes.
For all that she was a daughter of the ice, he wished that he had her fire.
*
Everyone seems to forget that Zuko received a classical education. He’s fully versed in logic, history, literature, calligraphy, rhetoric, poetry and music.
Gazing at the sea
A breath of airy being
Floating in the universe,
In which, since ancient times,
The spheres of the sun and moon
Have been immersed.
It leaps into his mind as they fight at the North Pole, and lingers as she knocks him breathless and freezes him to the wall.
Immersed, he thinks, bitterly, when he can’t move, and he’s staring down at her and the child Avatar she is protecting. Her talent is phenomenal: in a few short months she’s flown from fumbling to this fluid, fierce master of fighting forms (and is that too like Azula, when Zuko had had to gasp and grind for every scrap of power?).
But things shifted again. Once he’d won, once he’d got what he wanted but had been bested nonetheless and only prevailed because it happened to be dawn, he’d found his own words.
“You rise with the moon… I rise with the sun.”
A challenge. A balance. A promise.
*
Swaddled in the fogs of Ba Sing Se, he thinks of her every time he sees the moon.
He thinks of what it is that sets him apart from her: the courtly life, the warmth of the tropics, the accident (for what is destiny?) of being born a prince. How ironic, then, that he’s a refugee, a tea-server, desperate that nobody finds out who he really is.
How bitter that she is hosted by the Earth King, and travels with the Avatar in triumph and honour.
(How bitter it is, later, that he realises it was her fear of him that tore them from that comfortable life.)
The moon rises to meet
The pathetic pools left behind
By the receding tide.
What’s receding is his faith.
What’s left behind is his burning need to restore his honour.
What’s exposed is his hope, for what it is: a fragile thing without the Fire Nation’s indoctrination to hold it up. Pathetic pools, he thinks, and he wishes he could set things on fire.
*
In the crystal caves under Ba Sing Se there is no moon and there is no sun.
They are a daughter and a son of war. They are the children of leaders, forced to grow old before they are adults.
He will never tell anybody that he kissed her then. That they fought, but not with the bending they’ve learned so well. She slapped him, and he stumbled, and seized her, and in a snap they’d gone from snarling to a smouldering sweetness he’d never tasted before.
It is happenstance, and he does not grasp it with both hands.
The betrayal in her face when he goes home to everything he’s ever known hurts him to the heart. That when he knows he’s chosen his destiny and happenstance is damned.
*
She threatens his life when he gets his head on right and finally swings his ship around to join them.
She pushes him and punishes. She is a harsh taskmaster.
He doesn’t want her forgiveness, but he does want her friendship.
He aches to see how much the Avatar loves her, because it’s a poor reflection of the things he wants to feel.
Aang’s love is like the moon: shining and uncomplicated.
Zuko’s feelings are far from perfect, a scattering of shimmering moments that never make a whole, but they might, if you squint, look kind of the same. It is the way the face of the sun is never clear upon the sea.
So it’s sour in his mouth that he knows she needs revenge and that that gentle, powerful child tries to say no.
They find the man who killed her mother, and she isn’t moved to violence.
He adores her, then, in a flash of lightning that burns too brightly to last, but leaves its marks.
On the way back to the others, to her family, to people who have more right to love her, he covers her in a blanket and doesn’t ask her whether she’s alright, because he knows.
Her eyes are grateful. That’s what haunts him most.
*
The Ember Island Players have it righter than they know.
Oh, it’s grotesque. It’s painful to see something so twisted out of shape that still has the kernel of the truth.
They look at each other, horrified, guilty, and he wonders if he’s the only one who’s glad it’s true. For a few agonising moments, when her brother is laughing his head off at the improbability and Toph is smirking in their general direction, he feels nauseatingly naked.
Coolly, casually, during the scene change, her hand slips to the seat between them. She finds the way his fingers are gripping the bench and gently folds hers over his own.
He lifts his hand, a little, and she tucks her fingers into his and squeezes. Her eyes are on the stage. His heart is pounding.
“Oh, Zuko,” Sokka says, and Katara smoothly lifts her hand away, and suddenly he feels cold. “If I thought you’d touch my sister, I’d have to kill ya.”
Toph snickers. Katara rolls her eyes, and says, “Why, because if I were a princess I’d outrank you?”
They laugh. They all laugh, and Zuko tries not to think about the fact that she’d skipped straight from touching to marriage, because it makes sense until you think about it, and now he’s thinking, and it really doesn’t. Who does that, to respond to an idle joke?
He hears her tell the Avatar that she’s confused, and his heart is full of hope – because he shouldn’t be out there. It’s just… happenstance.
*
Mai tasted of spices, sunshine, and sarcasm. She felt like home. She coped with the madness that is the courtly world with her own caustic undercurrent.
He can’t forget salt on his lips, or the deliciousness of melting ice.
Katara wouldn’t cope, he thinks, and feels like a traitor for doing so. She would conquer.
*
They save the world in the end. And he should marry a Fire Nation noble and cement the line of succession, and she should marry Aang because she’s the one who woke him from the ice with her pain and passion and her power.
That would be the fairytale ending. Well: the ending of one fairytale, anyway.
But Aang is so young, and Katara is a fighter, and Zuko doesn’t love Mai the way she deserves to be loved. That’s a tragedy.
He learns to trust his instincts. He leaves Mai, and she’s sorrowful, but he knows from her eyes that she understands. They had very different wars, and she committed crimes in the Earth Kingdom that would send a poor signal in a Fire Lady.
He makes them Ambassadors, every one of the group Sokka still fondly calls “Team Avatar”. It is the least that they deserve. It grants them places at his court, but also lets them leave as they need or wish to. He tries not to notice the way Toph’s blind eyes tilt in his direction every time someone says Katara’s name.
*
A year after the end of the war, Aang tells him that things didn’t work out with Katara, and he sounds puzzled, but resolute. He commiserates when Zuko says the same about Mai.
Aang has a lot of the world to see, though. He is young. And they both have many friends.
He shouldn’t hope, he shouldn’t, but it washes over him like the incoming tide, and doesn’t that always make him think of her anyway?
*
He is nineteen, and the Fire Sages are pestering him for an heir. His hold has steadied his homeland, however precarious it may have seen at times. People are looking to the future, trade agreements are holding, and he needs to find a wife.
Marry a lady from the Fire Nation, say his conservative advisors, and cement your people’s loyalty. You are so different from your fathers, and our nation is used to war.
Marry a lady from the Earth Kingdom, say his capitalist advisors, and build strong trade agreements with the lands to the east. Show them the power of diplomatic alliances.
Zuko travels to Ba Sing Se to ratify a treaty, and to see his uncle. Serving tea in the apartment about the palatial shop, he sits, and sighs, and asks “What do I do?”
Iroh pushes tea towards him. “It is a tradition of the Fire Nation that the parents arrange a child’s marriage, for social gain,” he says, “and yet our greatest stories are tales of purest love.
“A bright moon rises above the sea.
In a distant place,
One dear to me
Is watching this same sight.
“Do you remember that from your studies?”
Adrenline floods through him as he watches his uncle’s eyes, so sharp, so loving, flicker over his face.
Iroh was there in the north. Iroh knows what the moon is to the waterbenders.
“I do, Uncle,” Zuko manages. “I remember all the poetry of the ocean.”
“The ocean is important to us, because it is how we journey around the world,” Iroh says, in that way that sounds like he’s rambling, but really means he has a point he’s leading you towards very gently, so that you think it’s your own idea when it hits you. “And marriage is a journey, my nephew, that must be undertaken as carefully as a voyage upon the sea.”
Zuko sips his tea and wonders what on earth to say to that.
Many minutes later, Iroh stands and picks up the pot to re-fill it. “Marry for love,” he says, and walks away.
*
When she comes to the palace on an official visit, three years after the end of the war, she is seventeen and the most beautiful woman he’s seen anywhere in the world.
He hadn’t invited her; she’d wanted to come, just because. Happenstance.
They laugh, they spar, they are not polite to each other. Perhaps there are whispers at court about how the Fire Lord looks more alive these days; perhaps discreet diplomatic notes are despatched to Ba Sing Se, to the South Pole, to Kyoshi Island.
Zuko and Katara see nothing but each other, and inch towards the things they long to say.
*
They are in the palace gardens on the night of the full moon. They were meant to be bending, but they’re tired, and in any case, tonight she’d definitely beat him. They’ve reminisced, they’ve laughed – and he’s apologised, again, for the twisting path that led him to wound her before he could heal himself.
“Oh, Zuko,” she says, fondly, spinning water around in patterns in the fountain, “you don’t need to say sorry. It was all right in the end.”
“Is it, though?” he asks. “Katara?” Because made his own destiny and he’s done with leaving things to chance.
She turns to him, and her face is luminous. “Isn’t it?”
And he kneels before her and intones the words that generations have spoken before him. “The sun rises in your eyes.”
She smiles and cries as she agrees to become his wife. It’s a challenge, a balance, a promise, a peasant becomes a princess, and maybe that’s a fairytale, too.
After that, he doesn’t care about happenstance, because she’s in his arms, but finally he’s calm and he thinks he understands happiness.